Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
Excuse me for the headline....I could not stop laughing. Verizon's snazzy cloud service, eponymously named "Verizon Cloud," will be shut down "for up to" 48 hours. Granted, it is being done over a weekend, but suppose you are a retail business open on Saturday and Sunday? Do you close the store? What are they thinking?
There is only one possible explanation for a 48 hour shutdown, and that is a terrible, really awful, horrible technical design. Somebody screwed up bigtime, and now they have to fix it.
If you put stuff in the cloud, you have to treat it like you treat a hard drive: you have to assume that the cloud WILL crash and that you could lose everything. The cloud is not magic, and don't treat it that way.
Technology News:
Death of TV: Part LXX: The fat lady just sang!
As the old saying goes, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." Dish Network just brought the fat lady out on the stage, and she is singing Sling TV. It's a new OTT (Over The Top) streaming video service that will include ESPN, Disney, CNN, TNT, and a bunch of other "channels," and I have "channels" in quotes because it is an archaic concept that dates back to the 1950s. But we know what it means.
Here is the money quote from the CEO of Sling TV:
"Millennials don't choose paid TV," said Roger Lynch, who was named CEO of Sling TV LLC. "So we designed a service based on how millennials consume content, with no contracts. You can come and go as you please."
If you are responsible for economic development in your community, ponder that statement. Or better yet, let me re-phrase it for you...."No one under 35 cares about cable TV." Or put another way, if you want young people to stay in or move to your community, you better have Internet capable of streaming multiple HD channels of "TV" over the Internet. It's a quality of life issue that you can't ignore.
Want help getting the right broadband infrastructure in your community? Give us a call (540-951-4400) and ask for Dave Sobotta. We would love to help.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Death of TV: Part LXVIV: The dam just broke
Not with a whimper, but a bang. The Washington Post has an article indicating that ESPN is going to roll out a streaming service for its sports content. This lack of live sports on the Internet has kept a lot of households tethered to a costly and bloated cable TV subscription. I think what happened is that ESPN figured out they were passing up huge revenue growth by staying tethered to cable. Many households, once they cut the cable TV bill, may well end up spending more on streaming video, but it will be in small amounts....FOR EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO WATCH. Choice...it's a wonderful thing.
The cable companies will limp along for a while by doing what they have been doing for several years now: ratcheting up the fee for their Internet service by 5% to 10% per year. But from a community perspective, hitching your economic future to a failed, copper-based business model is a recipe for stagnant jobs growth and a tough hill to climb in terms of business attraction.
Here is the Washington Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/01/05/espn-goes-streaming-through-dishs-sling-tv-no-cable-required/?hpid=z1
Newsletter:
Death of TV: Part LXVIII: Kids are cutting the cord
New data suggests that the death of cable and satellite TV is being led by children. Kids don't care about watching the latest episode of a cartoon...reruns are just fine to keep them amused. Kids are growing up with on-demand services like Netflix and Hulu for their video fix. When they strike out on their own, the notion of buying a package of cable TV is going to seem quaint.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Sony irony and "The Interview"
David Strom has a thoughtful analysis of the Sony hacking mess and the subsequent North Korean threats against the Sony movie "The Interview," where he points out several sad ironies in the two incidents.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Comcast must read this blog
Comcast must be reading my stuff. I have been noting for years now that the cable HFC network is not meeting the needs of home-based workers. Via Lightwave, Comcast has announced a new service to improve connectivity. But it sure sounds like you can't get it unless your company buys corporate service from Comcast, as the article mentions "low" construction costs to get fiber to your place of business. So it will likely be of limited usefulness. I'm skeptical that very many businesses are going to switch their business Internet provider to support work from home.
Technology News:
Just what we all need: A WiFi doorbell
The SkyBell is actually pretty cool. It is a WiFi-enabled doorbell with a camera and microphone. Stick it on the wall next to your front door. When someone pushes the "doorbell" button, you get can talk to them via your smartphone. It also has a motion sensor, so the camera turns on and notifies you if someone is hanging around your front door but has not rung the bell. Which might really be very useful if you live in a neighborhood with some sketchy individuals around (I'm thinking about some friends who live in Manhattan).
Technology News:
Part II: Who needs a Gig?
The incumbents love to ridicule Gig connections. AT&T sneered at the whole concept until Google announced they were going to do Gig fiber in Austin. About eight minutes later AT&T announced they had found a sudden need for Gig service in the Austin area (but nowhere else in the country...apparently Austin is "special" in AT&T's mind).
A colleague just sent me a screen shot that illuminates perfectly why a Gig of bandwidth might be occasionally useful. He had a hard drive crash, and being a smart guy, had everything backed up to offsite storage. The screen shot showed the time remaining to restore about 10% of his total file structure: one and a half days. If we multiply that by ten and assume that everything runs perfectly throughout the restore cycle (in my experience, a big IF), we are looking at about two weeks just to get your files back. Yea....AT&T is right...who needs a Gig?
Technology News:
The folly of avoiding shared broadband infrastructure
The main four lane road near my home has been getting Yet Another Fiber Cable (YAFC). By my count, there are now five, count'em, five cables installed in the right of way on one side of the road or the other. All placed there within the past fifteen years, and includes the phone company, the cable company, and three private fiber providers. Why three private providers? The county has built three schools in a row, and they all want the school business. It is so profitable that three different companies are building private fiber and fighting for the business.
I am writing about this now because last week, the fiber contractors installing the conduit cut the electric power main cables not once but twice in two successive days, cutting off electric service to the grocery store and the bank, as well as several other businesses on the route. The grocery store was closed for two days, which has to be painful with respect to lost sales.
The tragedy here is that a single shared broadband infrastructure, built years ago, would have given the schools much more competitive pricing at much lower cost (in large part because only one set of conduit/fiber is installed instead of three). And on that shared fiber, the schools could have bid out their needs to a five or ten companies instead of just the three with enough spare cash to build completely duplicated fiber infrastructure.
But there's more. By having the schools put their business on the community-owned shared infrastructure, the whole community would benefit because the schools would have sharply expanded the total market, and the cost of telecom services would have come down for everyone. Instead, we have public right of way ruined by overbuilding (see the cut electric cables--at least in part because the right of way is crowded), schools paying too much for bandwidth and Internet, and everyone else along that route still stuck with poor service--despite hundreds of homes like mine near this route, there is no fiber to the home available.
Technology News:
Internet coffee maker Bruvelo: I want one
The great Hunter S. Thompson said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." I wrote a couple of days ago about an Internet-enabled Mr. Coffee. But already, that coffee maker seems old and tired. It seems like the Internet coffee maker market just turned pro. Look at the features of the Kickstarter Bruvelo. It not only makes coffee, but it grinds the beans, pre-rinses the coffee filter, adjusts the water temperature, weigh the grounds for each cup, and will adjust the brew time. But wait, there's more! It will store recipes for individual beans....so if you want your French Roast brewed differently than your Breakfast Columbian, the machine will remember how you want each bean to be brewed. But wait, there's more! You can store all these coffee recipes in an iPhone app so you can tell the machine what to do in the morning.
Technology News:
Pages
